Tag Archives: zenfolio

The New SmugMug was launched today, and users can migrate their legacy sites to the improved templates whenever they desire. But don’t press that button yet: converting to one of the new templates will permanently install a branding footer on every page, and you can’t undo it, apparently. This means that if you currently “hide” the footer with html code (not allowed, but many do it) or if you had your site customized by a third-party … migrating to the new version will eliminate all concealment tricks. What will show up is one of the two lines (you choose!):

For those who joined SmugMug in the early days, you were grandfather out of the recent requirement that ad be displayed … I’m not sure if those grandfathered elite are still grandfathered on New SmugMug.

Of course, plenty of sites have a similar policy (e.g., WordPress), so my post title might seem a bit over the top. But many photographers don’t really want their potential clients to know exactly how much it costs to produce a 6′ canvas-wrapped wall photo because it reveals their profit, and many people don’t think photographers really need that much profit. And even if they didn’t mind clients knowing base lab prices, the name of the company is not really professional sounding, even though they are truly professional and wonderful at heart. The similarity that comes to mind is “Smuckers,” and it addressed the issue with a delightful ad campaign (“With a name like Smuckers, you have to be good”). “SmugMug” just sounds bad, and many photographers don’t want it on their site even if it’s at the bottom of the page.

I suspect that if they received 10,000 complaints about this issue, they’d reconsider. I tried for years and failed, but here’s the link if you want to register your anger. I recently gave up and migrated to Zenfolio…which allows me to remove all advertizing (my site, if you want proof). I miss many things about SmugMug, but I’m happy with my decision so far.

I moved my photographs from Flickr to SmugMug in part because they are famously responsive to suggestions from users, who can vote for change on the company’s “Feedback forum.” To help promote my favorite improvements, I thought I’d make a voting guide for my top 10 wishes, targeted of course at people who have SmugMug accounts. If that’s you, please use some of your Votes to bump them on the priority list.

Enable batch gallery selection. For example, if you want to alter a setting on 50 galleries, you currently need to tunnel through the selection maze (like at right) 50 times — totally infeasible to all but the off-in-the-head. Or what if you wanted to apply watermarking to all but one of your 800 galleries (then you’re like, totally screwed). What I’d like is a way to to select “all galleries in this category or subcategory” …and then to allow changes in settings within that hierarchy. Vote for this!

Partner with TinEye, a company that offers some fantastic ways to explore where your images end up on the Internet (example below, using my photograph of a s’more on a picnic table). You might find, happily, that those people who bought digital versions have used them as per agreement on their Facebook profiles, and credit you as the amazing photographer that you no doubt are. Or you might find that the image is the focal part of somebody’s Cafepress site, and you are not getting a dime. Or, that they are using your images to support the political campaign of the forces of evil. It would just be so nice to get a daily report of where your images are popping up. Currently, I do this with right-clicks in Firefox (there’s a plug-in), but that’s hard on SmugMug when right-click protection is turned on (as it should). Also, I’m not sure how watermarking affects the search algorithm, so having something native would be better. Vote for this!

Allow scaling of watermarks for different sizes. I’d love the ability to ramp up the obtrusiveness of my watermarks as the viewer looks at increasingly larger images. For small and medium images, viewer might see mild watermark so client can appreciate the photograph, its composition, etc. And when the potential client is looking at an extra large version to check for focus and glint in person’s eye (e.g.), watermark would be large and include lines that would render the photograph unusable even if stolen using screen capture.Vote for this!

Under the Buy menu, add a “post to my wall” action that would magically put the image into a framed print on a wall, with a group of photogenic people smiling at it, as if their lives are forever changed for the better. If done properly it would be slightly funny, and I bet it would increase impulse sales dramatically…people just don’t imagine art on their walls anymore. (My mock-up below is done via artsteps.com, a cool site that allows you to create multi-room exhibitions of digital files. I know I could have added some photogenic people to the image, but I don’t have anything that’s perfect, so just imagine them, OK? And imagine a couch and other objects that help give scale.) Vote for this!

Allow files to be renamed. I often need to send an image to somebody, and it’s easier to download it from SmugMug than it is to find on my computer. But if it’s named “vacation-81″ for some idiotic reason, it’s hard to find on the desktop when it’s hidden amid a bunch of other files that have equally non-descriptive names (we’re all guilty of this sometimes). Finally, I like to use an organism’s common name in the filename, so when I misidentify it (common!), I’d like to be able to correct the error so I don’t look like (complete) moron when a customer purchases a digital download . Currently I have to download the image, rename it, then use the Tool’s replace action to swap out the SmugMug image (all doable, but a pain). Also, for those of us who used Smugglr to move thousands of photos over to SmugMug from places like Flickr, this would mean that your photo named 6744792255_f4fa66c36b_o.jpg could be easily altered. Oh, and having good match between filename and image content might increase Google ranking, at least according to rumors I read on the Internet and thus must be true. Vote for this!

Allow owner-downloading of watermarked images. Sometimes you just want to send a photo to somebody in an email, but you don’t want to send something un-watermarked. Because SmugMug already has those watermarked images (in all sizes), allow the user to get them (under Tools). Currently one has to go back to Aperture or Lightroom and then Export with watermark…and that’s a pain. Vote for this!

Add field for photo titles. Everyone does this, except SmugMug. OK, not everyone. But I spent many, many years crafting titles on Flickr, and it’s hard to live without them. Vote for this!

Add a “Sort by month” for galleries, to supplement the options that already exist in the Arrange Photos menu (shown at right). Or sort by calendar day — just something that would group together all the shots from December even within a gallery that spans years. This would be really useful for those of us who have photo projects (or places) that span decades, but want viewers to see all the seasonal photographs together. E.g., it would be nice to have all my winter visits lumped together, separated from my summer visits. I’m not saying lots of people would use this, but it would be a fun option and much easier than arranging them all manually (which would work, if I had the patience). Vote for this!

Remove SmugMug’s copyright clutter from bottom of pages. Here’s a screen capture of mine:It’s small, but still a problem for me because a naive visitor on my self-hosted site (colinpurrington.com; I know, how original) could be confused/annoyed. If nothing else, it’s a visual distraction from the simplicity I was hoping to convey. Many people claim the branding and links in the footer might give potential clients access to the true cost of a 4×6″ print, but I think that’s a silly claim: visitors already know they can get a print at WalMart in under an hour for about 13 cents. The real reason is subconscious, I believe: professional photographers cringe when their sophisticated, beautiful photographs are framed by somebody else’s branding. As possible evidence, people don’t seem to agitate about the copyright information at bottom of their WordPress blogs — the name sounds normal and professional, and authors are indeed proud of the software. Another reason to omit the footer is that I really like home pages that load in a single window — I don’t want to burden the visitor with a scroll bar. Having the bottom 5-10% of a window devoted to something that the viewer doesn’t want to see is annoying to me on a design level. [Note: SmugMug allows some users to remove the footer (e.g., Donovan Fannon Photography), but not everyone — you can be put on Double Secret Probation if you try that without their approval.] Vote for this!

Change name. When I tell my friends or family that they can see my photographs on SmugMug, they snicker and contort their faces. Their derision is not because they know anything unbecoming about SmugMug, but because the name is silly in comparison to Flickr, Picasa, Photoshelter, Zenfolio, and such. “SmugMug” simultaneously conveys (I think) “smugness” and “snapshot” to somebody who doesn’t know the company is amazing. And the Comic Sans and smiley face logo just confirm that suspicion (again, to the naive visitor…underneath the bad name and logo, the company is truly fantastic). I’m sure an unbiased experiment would show this problem in a quantifiable way that would impress even those at SmugMug HQ: potential customers are turned off, and untold thousands of potential users are dissuaded from signing up in the first place. I’d really prefer a name that didn’t require an explanation about my choice of photo host. It’s like introducing a girlfriend whose name just happens to be Fugly. She’s super intelligent, painfully cute, and dynamic to boot (!), but people just can’t help but be distracted by her name (I know, I should get different friends). Fugly didn’t choose her name, but it’s a burden and she’ll no doubt change it — people do it all the time, and so do huge companies and even colleges (e.g., United Fruit ==> Chiquita, Philip Morris == >Altria, Backrub ==> Google, Marafuku ==> Nintendo, Leslie Lynch King ==> Gerald Ford, and Beaver College ==> Arcadia University). To its credit, SmugMug has tried to hide its name from some pages by crafting a logo that has “SM” on it instead of “SmugMug.” But using “S & M” as an abbreviation is, um, probably not without unintended danger. SmugMug could always remain the “parent” company and just rebrand it’s photo service offering with new name and logo, perhaps. Something should be done. It can be done!! [Note: if #9 was enacted, people wouldn’t be annoyed by “smugmug” because it would be visible.] VOTE for this!!! [update: SmugMug won’t allow this suggestion to be voted on for some reason; instead, ask them by email to please allow it to be listed…they allow “remove footer” to be voted on and discussed!]